508. Chapter 508

She’s fine in the DEO helicopter.

It feels… different, somehow.

Safer.

She knows the pilot and she can pilot the damn thing herself if she needed to.

In the DEO helicopter, she’s strapped in and she’s armed and she knows where the parachutes are.

In commercial jets?

She’s so much more powerless.

And then she keeps having these dreams.

These dreams about dying under the crush of metal after a screaming crash.

They’re probably from that crash from Geneva.

Well, the almost crash.

The thing that would have been a crash, if Kara hadn’t saved her.

But she’s scheduled to head out to Geneva – again – because, even though Winn teases that she doesn’t have a diplomatic bone in her body, she’s actually quite good at the negotiating thing.

And J’onn doesn’t trust anyone else on this particular job.

But there are the nightmares.

There’s the helplessness.

So she doesn’t want to go.

Not even a little bit.

Maggie holds her extra close through her panic attacks.

Through the panic attacks that the medicine doesn’t help with at all.

Kara holds her extra close through her panic attacks.

Through the panic attacks that get so bad her girlfriend calls Kara, so Kara can help.

And she does. Help.

Because Alex feels safe in Maggie’s arms, but add Kara’s to the mix?

Her breathing actually starts to regulate.

She wishes the flight were shorter.

She wishes she wasn’t going so far away.

She clenches her fists the entire morning before she leaves – Kara had kept her own hands between Alex’s all night long so she didn’t accidentally cut into her own skin in her sleep – and Maggie kisses each of her knuckles, each of her fingertips.

“I loaded your iPad with old episodes of The West Wing, and I got you the issue of that medical journal you like, okay, babe?”

“The one that’s not being published until next month?” Alex asks with hopeful, disbelieving eyes, and Maggie grins and shrugs.

“I know a guy,” she says casually, but Alex can tell it wasn’t easy.

Alex can tell she is so, so loved.

“Aaaand,” Maggie adds, pressing Alex’s phone gently into her hands. “I made you a mixtape.”

Maggie blushes at this, and Kara squeals, because god, that’s a great idea, she should do that for Lena. She’s already got certain ‘Nsync songs in mind.

“Mags, you made me a mixtape? What’s on it? Oh babe, I – “

Maggie accepts Alex’s excited kisses with a smile, with open arms and with slightly parted lips that make Kara turn away and hum loudly.

“Wait until you take off, then play it for yourself. No peaking, understand Agent Danvers?” Maggie smiles, and it’s Alex’s turn to blush.

“Understood,” she whispers, and her breathing eases as her sister and her girlfriend take her to the airport, as she hugs and kisses and hugs and kisses again and finally waves them goodbye at the security checkpoint.

She closes her eyes as the plane lifts, and she thinks of flying with her sister. She manages to breathe.

She flips on Maggie’s mixtape, she settles back, and she smiles as that Sigma and Rita Ora song that makes her heart leap every time starts filling her ears, filling her lungs, filling her blood.

She smiles, because a week halfway around the world isn’t nearly that long when she has her sister, and when she has this amazing, amazing woman, to come home to.